>If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute
The drift is not in a single direction. The total drift is not going to be significant for a very long time if ever.
That doesn't stop the (e.g.) FreeBSD folks run tests to make sure things are fine:
* https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2020-Nove...
* https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/leap-seconds/
Of course there's a whole lot of other userland code besides ntpd.
>If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute
The drift is not in a single direction. The total drift is not going to be significant for a very long time if ever.